Author Archives: oinsketta

Line and Color

I love lines, which come into existence mainly under a human hand.  I love making lines, dragging ink, or graphite, or a color, over a surface.  I love refining them (though I almost never erase them).   Making lines on a page is one of the great pleasures of my life, and one of the great exercises in freedom.   Often it doesn’t matter what those lines form themselves into– words, symbols, images– the tactile pleasure of making the lines remains.

You can see tiny kids scribbling, making lines is clearly a pleasure one can appreciate early on.  As the fine motor skills improve, the enjoyment of making purposeful lines grows too, but there is enjoyment to be had even scrawling, the pen gripped in a hand that is like a foot.

Since we live in a highly specialized world of false dichotomies, where everything is set against something else, we often hear visual artists divided into draftsmen (their craft being line) and colorists (their realm being the juxtaposition and combination of colors.)   Line or Color, take your pick.  

If I had to pick one, and fortunately I don’t, it would be line.  I love color, to be sure: it’s an incomparable pleasure to pour a beautifully colored ink on to a white page, watch it shine like a wet floor then dry into a luminous panel of pure color.  Or to blend them, or mix two or more colors to alchemize them into a new one.  I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite color.  I love a golden yellow, a little more orange than a sunflower’s petals, but I also love the blue gradient of the sky toward sundown.  I love scarlet, mustard color, many browns, the green of a tender sprout, hippie purple, grey.  Shoot, I love ’em all.  There are very few colors that leave me indifferent.

But with line, and enough determination to learn how to wield it, you can create many gradations between black and white.  These blocks of gradated darker and lighter blacks form a kind of color too, though without chroma.   You can make lines with color, of course, but a colorist isn’t primarily interested in that.

It is like this in many things humans do.  In music there is rhythm and melody, sometimes held to be distinct in the manner of line and color.  I find that line and color work best together, enhance each other ridiculously.  Same with rhythm and melody.  You can play in tune, play all the right notes, but it isn’t music unless it they are sounded and held against the rhythm.  In that regard, like the false choice between line and color, I’d have to pick rhythm if I could only have one.  A song without melody is not much of a song, but a song without rhythm, what the hell is that?

I close this little shot-in-the-dark with an observation about writing and another false dichotomy: love of language or love of story.  In the previous post I briefly compared books by William Kennedy, a former prize-winning journalist turned prize-wining novelist, and Stephen King, fantastically imaginative writer of numerous books that have been made into justly famous movies as varied as Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Fred Gwynne, Nathan Lane and Tom Waits, for the record.

I described Kennedy as being in love with language, and spreading its colors lushly on the page, and King as more plain-spoken and focused on the story, more of a draftsman laying down the essentials with a sharp, bold line.  Both writers are in love with language (who wouldn’t be in love with this miracle?) and both are intent on telling their stories.  Kennedy is more flamboyantly in love with words, King more low-key about it.  My favorite writer, Isaac Babel (as artfully translated by Walter Morrison) was madly in love with language and an inspired teller of highly condensed tales.  He tells unforgettable stories and doesn’t waste a perfectly-chosen word while painting scenes and drawing characters.  There is a line we dance on as we proceed, considering which darlings to murder and how, composed of all the colors of the rainbow.

What is it?

It’s astounding to realize that there are literally millions of people keeping journals on-line.  Countless web logs, “blogs”, bloggers, tweeters, twitterers, content creators of every stripe, filling the air with song and noise on tens of thousands of subjects.  A chorus of millions who can only potentially hear each other. 

Is this just the suddenly available mass expression of Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing?  The need to tell our story to another, to be heard as we reveal what moves us?   I looked for the quote just now on the internet, my battered copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God miles from where I’m typing now.  I recalled the scene of the two women talking in the night, filled with ‘that oldest human longing’, to make themselves known to each other.  Perhaps it mixes in my memory with proverbs I loved, since I read the book decades ago, but the quote I found “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Janie full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation,” seemed less elemental than the one I remember Hurston hitting me with when I was in my twenties.

Never mind.  I am sending these words out like the solitary space traveller forcing a rolled up slip of paper into an air-tight bottle and ejecting it through a one-way valve into the black infinity of space.

Wondering about this oldest human longing, as I recall the long story I heard last night of a new friend’s travails in an Asian military academy thirty years ago.  I sat at his kitchen table, with other things on my mind, like a guitar that needed to be fixed, though neither of us knew exactly how to get at the electronics inside the F-hole, and listened to a long story about things that happened decades ago.  I listened carefully, as I am only now learning to do, and reminded him a couple of times, when he got tangled up, where his diversions had taken off from.  The stories were interesting and put me in mind of others, which I did not tell, preferring to hear where these were going. 

I thought of Sammy, Sekhnet’s father, someone she often dismissed when I first met her.  I am interested in stories, particularly the stories old people tell of a disappeared world I can only imagine.  I have questions for them.  They like that, but not too many, of course, because they are trying to tell a story.  Sammy and I got along very well, largely because I was genuinely interested in what he had to say.  Another part of that oldest human longing, to have our words taken in respectfully by someone else.  But story, I notice over and over, is key.

I thought of two books I took out of the library recently.  One was by William Kennedy, the other by Stephen King.  Kennedy started with a flourish, his agile prose a song snapping like a flag in the breeze, now moving like a tango, now to sweaty barrelhouse piano twelve hundred miles north.  Soon he was dancing out his sheer love for language and dealing ten flavors of nuance, as a complicated story began to decant itself.  I read the first chapter, then took a look at King’s novel.  King did not flourish anything, there was no dance, he never sang more than a note or two.  He started right off, in an engaging voice, telling the story I soon found myself reading until it was told, 500 pages later.  I later finished Kennedy’s book and liked it too, but I was sucked directly into the story King was intent on telling me in 11/22/63.  The name of Kennedy’s book did not stick with me.

The writer recommends

A prolific writer, whose many books have moved and entertained me, periodically writes a slim book of advice, a nonfiction attempt to be part of the change he wants to see in the world.  I have one here now, called Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation.  I have to say, he does his work much better in fiction, like in the magnificent recent novella The Gift of Fire.

Read The Gift of Fire with an open mind and you may find yourself deeply moved by the author’s vivid, animated example of the kind of world humans could have if we followed our deeper, higher natures.  A description of the story will not do the short book justice, get it from the library, read it.  Another great book by my favorite living writer.  I highly recommend it.

We turn now to his latest book of advice.  Published because he is a famous writer who has made millions for his publisher, it has little of the charm of the novels, but it moves toward the same end– showing what the world could be, if people only struggled to open their eyes and live in accord with what we all know in our hearts to be the right way to live.

One of the twelve steps the author prescribes for waking from our media-induced trance and finding out who we are and how to fix this severely broken world is to write daily.  My man is a writer, and he writes daily, and he is paid well several times a year for his new books, probably given large advances for each next one.  He’s had books made into Hollywood movies starring Denzel Washington.  He lives the life I’d like to live, if I had any idea how to start down that road.

He gets up every day and writes for three or four hours.  That’s his work day.  Then he goes out into the world, does whatever one does out there.  Returns at night to sleep.  Gets up the next day and writes for three or four hours, and so forth.  Every few months, it would appear, he has a new manuscript finished.  It goes to his editor, they work it over a bit, it’s out in print and I get a copy of it it at my local library.  A nice arrangement for everyone.

Step Six of the Twelve Steps Toward Political Revolution is called Everyday.  What we should do every day, those of us who are serious about not living as exploited zombies but doing what we are meant to do on this earth, is to write.  This should be done, the writer says, 365 days a year.  He says we don’t need to spend much time doing this, the drill is that it must be done daily.  The time of day doesn’t matter, after work, before work, the main thing is to have a regular practice that sits us alone with our thoughts daily and causes us to organize them while digging toward the deeper truths of our lives.

“Yes,” I think, “it is a good practice.  Shoot, I do it myself.  But you must realize, man who makes his living by writing what it pleases you to write, that it is easier for you to put in the recommended  ninety minutes to two hours a day searching your soul than it is for the bus driver, the cop, the campaign contribution bundler, the single mother with three kids, the school teacher, the data technician, the salesman, the career guardian ad litem.”

I don’t know where else to go with this thought, except to note that this famous writer and I were in the Creative Writing program at The City College at the same time.  His mentor was a guy named Tuten, mine was Mirsky, and our paths never crossed, that I can recall.  His imagination and drive led him to create a brooding detective character that became a franchise.  I was less productively consumed by my brooding which rumbled through the more amorphous and problematic things I produced.  I assume Tuten was a help to him, I believe I read something to that effect.

Mirsky always expressed a great belief in the importance of what I was writing, and lamented that, like much of his recent work, there was just no place in the market to sell it.  He did eventually hook me up with an editor, the grand-daughter of the Straus from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Somewhere I still have the accomplished young English major’s letter.  The writing was good, she said, but the pages I’d sent her indicated that the narrator had not undergone the kind of epiphany and transformation necessary for every great novel.  She closed with kind regards.

What I know about the guy

I don’t know much.  He owned a very successful factory, employing many.  He is a writer of songs and stories.  He likes to talk, sing and perform.

During the longest conversation I had with him he told me that his father was a gambler who was either rich or one step ahead of the landlord.  He told me the family had moved forty-two times before he was fifteen, often at night.

For his bar-mitzvah, when he was thirteen, his father was flush.  800 people were invited, there was sixty singer boy choir and a diva from the opera.

Then they were running again, one step in front of creditors. He vowed never to be like his father.

He has a difficult relationship with a very troubled son in college.

“What happened to them?”

My sister, who does not have an easy life, was roughed up by our parents during the long battle that was our childhood.

“You had it much worse,” she told me once, “because you stood up to them, you always fought back.”

Whether I had it much worse, I’m not sure, but it was bad enough.  And it’s true I fought with them, all through my childhood and beyond.  My sister and I grew up in a war and it was everyone for themselves.  Violence and anger begat more of the same, as well as distrust, intense dislikes and other toxic biproducts.  

Eternal vigilance against bullies and exploiters was a theme in personal and professional life, and a detriment in both.   I never learned how to be direct and get what I need, the overarching moral component always cast a menacing cloud over those practical considerations, confrontation with the inevitable enraged, petty assholes life places everywhere was unavoidable to me.

Now I am committed to nonviolence, in word and deed.  It is  a hard, bumpy road in a rugged winners vs. losers society where sucker-punches are considered good sport.  You will notice quickly, if you announce your commitment to nonviolence, that people you meet, including those closest to you, will challenge you continually.  As soon as you slip, they’ll be ready to point and smirk.  You will not, like Gandhi, have a community of like-minded fellows to support and applaud your resolve, but an army of hooters, ready to restrain themselves or bust loose when your fist clenches in spite of itself.

I recently found a video of my parents as a young couple.  There was one amazing sequence where my father, an angry, quick-witted, supremely defended individual who believed, not without evidence, that the world is full of betrayal, turned in the sunshine and smiled at the camera as he walked.  Not a bad looking man in photographs, the man in the movie radiated optimism, intelligence, humor, warmth, and that nonchalant sense of his own power that the world calls ‘charisma’.  I watched it again, ran it back, watched the handsome, poised young man turn again to smile directly into the camera’s eye.  I described the sequence to my sister over the phone.

“What happened to them?” she asked, half laughing, half full of horror.

I didn’t know, but I described again how this good-looking young man radiated confidence and seemed ready to take a big bite out of a delicious looking world.  My sister and I never met this man, or even his reflection or shadow.

“I think it was us,” my sister said, “I think our being born did it to them, changed them for the worse.”

I didn’t think so, don’t think so.  But I recognized it was the scars in my sister’s brain that let her come so easily to that conclusion.  Our parents had seemed happy, were both good-looking, life was ahead of them, glittering.  Then, by the time we knew them they were both pretty unhappy campers.  She puts the evidence together, in the light most damning to herself, et, voila, a conclusion that can only lead to more pain.

My father’s soul was broken early, and I know some of the  terrible details of how it was done.  My mother, likewise, a child entering a lifetime of uneven combat with a cunning adult caregiver swinging a club.  It was waiting for them from the beginning, the fear, denial, anger, over-eating, lashing out in blame, the neuroses that came later. 

“I think it was us,” says my sister again.  It’s Occam’s Razor to her, the shortest explanation, everything else being equal, tending to be the right one.  They were happy, we were born, they were miserable.  Therefore, it must have been us.

I told her I didn’t think so, that it was waiting there all the time, the inevitable defeat they were set up for from the start.  But she remained convinced that it was our parents having my sister and me that destroyed their chances for happiness.

And I think of the scars that were inflicted during all those battles around the dinner table.  A parent who was not scarred that way would never think of inflicting it on their child, no matter how much of a trial or disappointment the kid was.  It takes a lifetime of conscious work to get some actual healing done, sometimes more.  And while you’re doing it, it’s best to deal mildly with the hecklers.

Digging Myself Out

The same force that used to drive me away from digging myself out is now slowly coming together to help me dig myself out.  Supervising the reversal of this force is slow, patient work.

It is either remove some of this heavy dirt that is closing in or be buried in it before I’m dead, it seems to me now.   And the force that kept me from digging had the easy appeal of fun.   It offered the stark choice: “would you rather tackle this hopelessly complex mountain of stuff, or invent some nice things against the tasty vamp behind the curtain?”   It wasn’t much of a choice, actually, the tasty vamp won every time, even as the mountain became higher, deeper, more difficult to think about taking apart.

But I take my courage where I find it now, shredding all but the courtliest examples of my former craft when I take the folders apart.  The hundreds of pages not in folders usually make me wonder why they weren’t tossed a year earlier, in some cases five years earlier.  I don’t wonder long, on a mission, now, first to clear the table and desktops.  If the mission lasted twenty minutes today, well, that’s twenty minutes to the good.

It took many years for the mountain to get this dark and dense, it will not be scaled and resized  in the blink of an eye.  It will take many, many, many blinks of an eye.  And then some.

Jefferson Never Fathered Slave children footnote

I have been opining about Thomas Jefferson here fairly regularly, so a conservative friend sent me links to a debate among historians intent on debunking  “lies” about the great man.   I was struck by the conclusory claim that the DNA link between several slave children and Thomas Jefferson was retracted shortly after it was published in 1998.  It certainly wasn’t retracted by the author of a book on the DNA evidence I saw speak at the New York County Lawyers Association some time after I became a lawyer in 2000.  

The author David Barton is paraphrased on Pat Robertson’s website:

In Jefferson’s defense, David addresses some of the biggest myths about Jefferson’s reputation:

  1. Lie: He fathered a child/children by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings.

Truth:  In 1998, the journal Science released the results of a DNA inquiry as to whether Jefferson fathered any children through his slave Sally Hemings.  Eight weeks after the blockbuster DNA story was issued, it was quietly retracted, without fanfare.  The news exonerating Jefferson did not make the same splash in the headlines.  The announcement came at the beginning of President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings for lying under oath to a grand jury about his sexual activities with a young intern in the Oval Office.  They argued Thomas Jefferson had engaged in sexual tysts so therefore President Clinton should not face questions about his sexual misbehavior.

http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bios/David_Barton_070412.aspx

 
It would have been very easy to put a hyperlink on that website pointing to a source to argue the author’s point to a skeptic like me.  I was pretty well convinced by a variety of sources– outside of the DNA test–  that Madison Hemings, Eston Hemings and one or two others were the offspring of a decades-long affair between Jefferson and his departed wife’s half-sister (they had the same father), the slave Sally Hemings.  So was at least one distinguished French guest of Jefferson’s who marveled at the likeness between the young red haired slave pouring his wine and his host at Monticello.  Then there’s the fact that Sally’s four light skinned children were the only slaves Jefferson ever freed, among hundreds.  Sally was freed after her master’s death by her new master, who was also her niece.
 

I know of no “retraction” of the DNA evidence, which, as I recall, linked the children to either Jefferson or a close male relative of his.  The case for the relative being the father of several children over decades is weak.  The case for Jefferson being the father very strong, the beautiful 15 year-old Sally and her brother were with the widower Thomas Jefferson in Paris and each of the slave children was born exactly nine months after Jefferson’s periodic stays at Monticello.  
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Other flags went up while reading the short rebuttal of this “lie”.   I found the citation of Clinton’s blow job denials in the context of when the DNA link was made and supposedly retracted to be pretty ridiculous, one of those telltale signs that the author has an ax to grind.  I don’t particularly care what Jefferson thought about the bible, or Christianity– or whether Clinton stuck an unlit cigar in his love struck intern’s vagina, for that matter.  
 
It’s like arguing about whether increased greenhouse gases, gases largely the result of human activity, have anything to do with global warming– if you believe the earth is warming at an alarming rate as virtually all climate scientists tell us.  If you can find scientists who tell you definitively that there’s no connection with human activity, no warming, that it’s all some kind of left-wing conspiracy against free enterprise, well, I guess that’s good enough.  Arguing about history is even more futile than arguing about science– in science at least there are experiments that can be done and  data that can be produced to show a theory more or less likely.

OK, Forget Gratitude: Pat Tillman

Recovering from a debilitating cold yesterday I read the last two hundred pages of Jon Krakauer’s highly contextual biography of Pat Tillman,  Where Men Win Glory.   Reading Krakauer’s crisp, intelligent prose I found myself reliving some of the horrors of the eight years that unspooled after Al Gore took the high road and stepped aside after the one-off,  party-line Bush v. Gore decision stated that as the recount it stopped on December 9 could not now be concluded before the rarely observed certification deadline of December 12, that Bush, leading by 154 votes and falling, was the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.

Some may take offense at my characterizing those eight years as filled with horrors.  “Horrors,” they will say, “caused by Islamic fascists who still want to kill us.  That’s why we can’t have a president who is weak on terror, or hesitates to use torture, or wants to tax job creators, or forces people to have medical insurance.”

I was thinking about the shadowy nature of what we call history the other day.  I’d received a series of emails directing me to a debate between rival conservative historians about whether or not Jefferson believed in Christ or accepted the Gospels, or possibly even had a child by a slave.

As to the child by a slave, one wrote that this was a lie.  He cited the so-called DNA evidence of 1998 and how the dramatic claim had been trumpeted, then quietly retracted, as Bill Clinton feebly tried to use it as a defense against the serious charge that he’d lied about getting a blowjob.  I offer a footnote on dat in the next post, along with what the conservative historian himself had to say (as represented on  Pat Robertson’s website). 

The Bush administration invaded Iraq and redefined torture to make it permissible against those suspected of perpetrating evil a) out of a sincere patriotic belief it was doing God’s work; b) for cynical and miscalculated geopolitical and financial reasons; c) for brilliant and lucrative geopolitical and financial reasons; d) because they honestly despised the idea of “International Law”; e) in defense of our freedom; f) to fight them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here; g) to secure cheap oil so the war would pay for itself; h) to weaken Iran and intimidate the rest of the Axis of Evil; i) because we can; and so forth down the alphabet.

If people have such divergent views of the present and recent past, how can we expect history to emerge with clarity unclouded by partisanship?  Particularly as we live in a world where perception managers are paid top dollar to make sure that what we perceive is what is most helpful to their paymasters’ cause.

Pat Tillman emerges in Krakauer’s important book as a remarkable, likable, very intelligent man.  Full of passion, and ruled by loyalty, he turned down a contract worth almost ten million dollars to stay with a last place team, the only NFL team to see his potential and draft him, close to the end of the final round.   His agent (who stood to make a lot of money) was flabbergasted, telling Tillman he’d be offered the league minimum of $512,000 by Arizona.  Tillman told him he was staying with Arizona, the only professional team who showed faith in him in the draft, and signed a contract for $512,000.

When Wahabi suicide bombers killed thousands on September 11th, Pat Tillman was stunned, like most Americans.  Unlike most Americans he thought long and hard about the best way to serve his country, turned down the $3.6 million contract Arizona was now offering him, and signed up for a three year hitch as an Army Ranger.   In this elite unit he figured to be in on the hunt for Bin Laden and other fanatics.   Motivated by doing the right thing, he and his brother Kevin, who enlisted with him, soon found themselves in an untenable situation.

The Tillmans’ were among the first boots on the ground in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq.  Pat knew at once the Iraq war was a cynically launched illegal war that would have disastrous effects.  Krakauer includes a few gloating remarks Bin Laden made about this American blunder, which clearly delighted the murderous jihadist.  It was exactly the trap Bin Laden had hoped to lure the Americans into.  

On the third day of the Iraq war, when Americans were unaccountably not welcomed with flowers and candy in a Shiite area President G.H.W. Bush had encouraged to rebel against Saddam, and then promptly abandoned to their fate, an erroneously called in air strike killed 17 Americans pinned down in Nasiriyah.  This “friendly fire” fratricide was quickly covered up by Bush Administration perception managers who recognized it for the public relations disaster it would have been.  A story was concocted about the heroism of a private named Jessica Lynch, captured earlier in the day of the fratricide, and the war machine went marching on in sure-footed spin control mode.

Tillman was among the 1,000 American soldiers mobilized for the rescue of Jessica Lynch, seriously injured in a car crash as her Humvee was fleeing a firefight after her convoy made a wrong turn into what would soon be named “Ambush Alley”.  The reality was that the injured woman had not fired her gun, which had jammed, and had been treated well by Iraqi hospital staff and doctors after her capture.  The Iraqi hospital treated her and, once her condition stabilized, sent her in an ambulance to the nearest American checkpoint to return her to American care.  The Americans at the checkpoint, fearing a trap, waved the ambulance away.

A few days later they arranged the dramatic rescue of a female soldier they claimed had valiantly shot at the enemy down to her last bullet.   She’d been seriously wounded during the firefight, stabbed, tortured and raped after her capture and had bravely stood up to all of it.   She was a hero, in the invented story, rather than a victim of a series of American fuck-ups during the first days of an ill-planned, unjustifiable war that was quickly becoming the disaster many had warned it would become.  

At the time of her rescue Private Lynch was lying in a sporadically guarded hospital in Nasiriyah, the commandos who rescued her met little resistance.  Tillman noted in his journal after the staged rescue that he thought the size of the rescue force excessive, but wished the girl, Jessica, well and was glad they had rescued her.  Several other Americans captured with Ms. Lynch (at least one later killed) were not rescued, but the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch was front page news for weeks.  The made-for-the-movies best-seller made everyone feel so much better than the truth.

A year later, having completed his Ranger training, Pat Tillman finally found himself in the mountains of Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border area where bin Laden, Haqqani and some of the worst of the bad guys were hiding out.  This was the duty the Tillmans had signed up for.  They were deployed as part of Operation Mountain Storm for just over a week, and had yet to engage the enemy, when one of the platoon’s Humvees  was disabled and needed to be removed from the rugged terrain for repairs.

The best way to do this was with a Chinook helicopter, which would lift it in a huge sling, but most helicopters were deployed in Iraq at this point.   Because of the four day wait for a transport helicopter in Afghanistan the Ranger commanders back at headquarters ordered Tillman’s platoon to transport the disabled Humvee to the nearest paved road for transport by truck.

The platoon leader was also ordered to conduct a sweep through a nearby village, a village at the end of a long, twisting canyon pass ideal for ambushes.  He was ordered to divide his men into two groups, one to tow the disabled Humvee, the other to search the village.

He urged his commanders to reconsider the orders.   His commanders consulted Rumsfeld’s orders, and an arbitrary timetable for having boots on the ground to search villages in each sector, and denied the request.  The platoon leader split the platoon, with the assurance that his half platoon (including Pat Tillman) could camp outside the village to be searched and wait for the second half of the platoon (including Kevin Tillman) to arrive the next day before actually conducting the search.

The order made no fucking sense, split the Ranger force for no reason, and wound up costing Tillman his life, but what are you going to do?  Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.

The facts emerged several years after Tillman’s televised memorial service portrayed Tillman as a Silver Star recipient cut down by enemy fire while valiantly saving his fellow Rangers during an ambush, rather than a man shot three times in the forehead by a trigger-happy American spraying bullets in an adrenalized panic after the ambush was over.  

The facts only came to light after a super-heroic several year-long effort by Tillman’s family, most especially his mother and his brother Kevin.  The Army conducted several detailed investigations into the incident over the course of several years.  The initial investigation told most of the story, but it was deemed unsuitable, as it pointed the finger at the arbitrary and idiotic command to split the platoon.  Years, and thousands of pages, later the simple truth could eventually be discerned, though, for the most part only the lowest ranking men involved were assigned any blame for Tillman’s accidental death.

Tillman arrived with half the platoon at the tiny village.  No men were present, which struck everyone as odd.  It turned out the men, who’d been paid, were waiting on the ridge to fire on the second part of the split platoon, inching through the narrow pass with the disabled humvee.   When the firing started moments later Pat Tillman raced to the top of the ridge to see what he could do to help the men under fire, including his brother Kevin.

Tillman, a Ranger named Bryan O’Neal and an Afghan named  Sayed Farhad took positions on the ridge.  Twilight was coming on, the shots from the ambush behind them in the canyon had died down.  Experienced Squad Leader Greg Baker, in the first Humvee of the second half of the platoon, staring through the fog of war, saw the bearded Farhad on the hill and, even though he recognized him as wearing a uniform similar to the Rangers’ rather than the robes worn by all Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, took no chances and shot him dead.  Two others in the Humvee swung their automatic weapons around and opened fire with their squad leader.   Tillman was waving his arms, yelling out his name over the impossible racket of the machine guns.

He took three bullets in the forehead from a gunner named Trevor Alders who squeezed off two bursts from his automatic weapon from about 120 feet away.  The blast pulverized Tillman’s skull and pushed his brain out the back of his head where it fell, virtually intact, among the rocks.  His brain was collected the following day, bagged in a ziplock, put into an ammo case, and disposed of.

News of Tillman’s death reached Washington just as the administration-imposed two week media blackout on the Abu Gharib torture story was about to end.  It became necessary, therefore, to burn Tillman’s uniform and personal effects, including his last journal, order his colleagues to say nothing about the events of April 22, 2004, and ship his virtually headless body back to the US naked, decorated with a hastily stage-managed Silver Star for actions that did not actually take place, and conduct a televised service for an American hero who did not hesitate to give his life for his country.

Grateful

That I am what I am.

That I can go back to sleep off this cold that has deposited rattly grey crud on the tops of my lungs.

For the wonderful dreams I had last night and this morning, dreams I spent an hour just now transcribing from scribbled bedside notes.

That I know what I know, believe what I believe, do what I do.

Gratitude!

Not to forget to be grateful.  Gratefulness is as life-giving as peevishness is life-draining.

Lest I forget to be grateful, I’m going to make it a practice to add a few words of gratitude here from time to time.  I’m happy to be able to do it.

I am grateful for all the things I can do and for being able to see, hear, taste, smell, touch.

I am thankful for people who care.

I am grateful for each small, upward step I am able to make toward being the change I want to see in the world.

I am grateful for laughter, something I fondly remember.

I am grateful for remembering to be grateful once in a while.